The Literacy Curriculum & Bilingual Education - Karen Cadiero-Kaplan

Cadiero-Kaplan, Karen. The Literacy Curriculum & Bilingual Education: A Critical Examination. New York: Peterlang, 2004.

This book puts bilingual education and literacy pedgagogy into conversation within a historical perspective on practices within the US over time.  Cadiero-Kaplan shows that education policy related to literacy decisions are tied to political and economic structures and identifies four types of ideologies that were prominent (and remain so to different degrees) at the time of her book's publication.  These ideologies include the following:

• Functional Literacy: Literacy is taught as skills to participate productively in school and society.  Education fits a school-as-factory model and includes basal readers, skill & drill activities, and a back-to-basics approach.  Students primarily de-code texts, and many students are tracked into such classes according to evaluations that corresponds to linguistic and ethnic backgrounds.
• Cultural Literacy: Literacy is taught as core cultural beliefs, morality, and common values through focus on cannonical text classics and rote memorization.  The focus is on providing cultural knowledge necessary for success (likely Bourdieu's notion cultural capital), but often serves to replicate elite privilege based on student background since they are taught as advanced courses.  It focuses on analyzing and understanding texts.
• Progressive Literacy: Literacy is taught as a process of personal discovery through a constructivist and whole language approach.  It takes student interests and backgrounds into consideration, but doesn't explicitly invite students to evaluate or challenge texts.
• Critical Literacy: Literacy practices are student-centered and focus on personal discovery, but both students and teachers deconstruct texts and engage in sociocultural realities within and outside the classroom.  It is often seen as a threat to the structures of public education because it questions underlying hegemony built into education.

 She also identifies two fundamentally different models related to bilingual education that impact multicultural students and intersect with these ideologies of literacy.  These are listed below:

• Compensatory Education: Students are taught English in order to access educational content and use a subtractive approach to bilingual education, so the focus is on the best models for teaching English and educating in English.
• Quality Education: Students are taught educational content using the most effective language and culture, schools respond to advances in education, and students can integrate socioculturally while gaining English proficiency and maintaining proficiency in other background languages. 

The following image shows overlapping time periods for literacy ideology & bilingual education in the US in relation public policy.

As a way to mitigate the stark contrast of teaching literacy practices that separate reading 'the word' from reading 'the world' (following Freire's conception of literacy), Cadiero-Kaplan suggests teaching students according to a model of critical literacy to identify hegemony in school texts as well as the historicity of knowledge since the stakes of these literacy ideologies are heightened for multilingual students.

Multiple Literacies for the 21st Century - Brian Huot, Beth Stroble, Charles Bazerman

Huot, Brian, Beth Stroble, and Charles Bazerman. Multiple Literacies for the 21st Century.  Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2004.

"We live not only in the built world of cities and roads and electric grids, but in a built symbolic world of inscriptions." (Bazerman 437)

The editors of this book frame the collected chapters from the 2nd Watson Conference by affirming that literacy is not static and is in fact multiple.  They reject the dichotomy that gained traction in the early 20th century which impacted later educational practices that set up a dichotomy between between orality and literacy where literacy represented written forms of language and was seen as developing students' superior cognitive ability (as opposed to formal schooling training them in certain privileged forms of communication).  Instead, they see literacy as an inherently reflective practice and a tool of critical consciousness.  Bazerman points out that material technologies mediate literacy change and that elaborating activity systems lead to elaborating forms of literacy and places the authors' understanding of literacy in "the information age" resulting from the "electronic revolution."  Major sections of the book include literacy narratives; literacy as it relates to schooling, technology, and other senses/capacities; critical literacies, and reflections.

Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis - Ruth Wodak & Michael Meyer (eds.)

Wodak Ruth & Michael Meyer, eds. Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis. 2nd ed. Los Angeles: Sage, 2009.

Each chapter presents a different approach to critical discourse analysis from influential researchers in the field of Critical Discourse Analysis and the 'CDA Group' where the uniting concepts of this heterogeneous, eclectic field of investigating social phenomenon are power, ideology, and critique.  Principles include interdisciplinary problem-orientated approaches, making ideologies and power transparent,  and making research positions explicit through self-reflection. Most approaches assume linguistic background knowledge and position the researcher as advocate.  As presented by Wodak and Meyer in the introduction, the main research agenda of CDA is to analyze, understand, and explain the following:

• the impact of the Knowledge Based Economy and its recontextualization
• new phenomena in media and transnational developments
• the impact/change of modes and genres according to new spatio-temporal conceptions

...while integrating:

• cognitive approaches and differing epistemologies
• qualitative & quantitative methods (11)

The approaches in the chapters that follow are quite diverse including:

Dispositive Analysis (DA) from Siegfried Jäger and Florentine Maier
Socicognitive Approach (SCA) within Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) from Teun van Dijk
Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) from Martin Reisigl and Ruth Wodak
Corpus Linguistics Approach (CLA) from Gerlinde Mautner
Social Actors Approach (SAA) from Theo van Leeuwen
Dialectical-Relational Approach (DRA) from Norman Fairclough

#Discourse #ResearchMethods #Power #Empire #Language #Multi-modal